“Home” isn’t just where the heart is. It’s something more personal.

“I came to realize home to me means the place – rather, the space – where least effort is needed to be myself.”

Lola Akinmade ÅKERSTRÖM

As much as I wanted to revel in the cliché that home was where my heart – my husband – is, the notion of home was a lot more nuanced and complex than just falling in love, settling in, and starting my own family.

I recognized that same anchoring feeling when I first moved to the US as a 15-year old teenager from Lagos, Nigeria. With an identity firmly rooted in being from the Yoruba tribe, I was met with confusion when I realized that wasn’t enough. That I needed to be someone else and was now seen as “black” first with all its societal connotations, not African.

That was when the concept of home started deconstructing itself from a place and rebuilding itself as space. My move at 15 years was when Lagos stopped being my physical home. But as I struggled in a new society with new labels, boxes and corners it tried to forcefully shove me into, I began to discover that I needed to find communities where I didn’t need to push back against the weight. Spaces where I could just effortlessly exist as I once did in Lagos, Nigeria.

Over time, I came to realize that home to me means the place – rather, the space – where least effort is needed to be myself. It would be naïve of me to define home as where I feel the most comfortable. Families and relationships will always remain deeply complex institutions. But home is the space where I’m allowed to exist without explanation.

My concept of home was further solidified when I started getting beneath Swedish culture and its psychological mindset governed by an ethos called “lagom.”

On the surface, lagom is often described as “not too little, not too much, just right.” But it is a lot more nuanced than that. If you think of this mindset as a scale, anything that tips it heavily to either side (too little, too much) is considered stress, and so the mindset constantly recalibrates itself to keep that scale balanced.

Lagom pares down material things and relationships that are perceived as causes of stress and tries to focus on the most essential things and most important relationships in one’s life.

Each of the places I’ve lived have given me profound gifts, the puzzle pieces in my quest for redefining what home truly means to me, and decoupling that thought from physical geography.

Nigeria gave me deep roots. Roots are important to plants because they feed and nourish it by sucking up nutrients, minerals, and water from the soil – culture and traditions.

The US was where my notions of home morphed from where I came from to spaces where I felt completely myself and didn’t need to push back against society’s expectations of what and who I was supposed to be.

Now, based in Sweden for the last 10 years, the Swedish mindset of lagom has helped me pare down my life to reveal its most important values and most crucial relationships.

Home is also found in meaningless WhatsApp conversations I have with siblings across these three continents – Europe, Africa and North America.

Putting all these pieces together, this means regardless of where I find myself in the world, I find home in one of those mental spaces of recognition.